That sounds surprising, do you have a source? Are you including all kinds of fraud, not just shoplifting?
For that matter how are the estimates of employee vs. customer shoplifting separated?
Should be quite easy to find data on this because companies probably research it a lot - might be skewed ofc.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/92309-annual-retai...
I will add that even if the net amount is the same, it is much worse morally to rob a worker than a business.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/12/workplace-crime-costs-us-bus...
Edit: just remembered a funny anecdote, a employee was caught stealing food at krogers, but it was normal enough that they told him if he paid for it they would forget it happened. He pretended to check out and was caught stealing the same food twice so they had to fire him. It was like a 2$ sandwich.
They then interview someone else about their independent research that only shows about $400 million in theft.
I believe the data is based off the Hiscox report [1], which makes the extremely important point that 85% of losses are due to employees at the managerial level or above - who are of course far less likely to be victims of wage theft! So this “eye for an eye” mentality is truly gross, beyond just the ways where it’s self-evidently gross.
[1] https://www.hiscox.com/documents/2018-Hiscox-Embezzlement-St...
An extreme case: What if the business only breaks even and it pays many specialized workers while doing so? Stealing from such a business and thereby killing the business will cost every worker his or her job. Stealing from this business is therefore equivalent to stealing the livelihood from every worker. The moral wrongdoing in this hypothetical scales like the number of workers.
b) Speaking from personal experience: having your wages stolen puts you in a horrible position of wondering if maybe you’ll get paid if you keep your head down, or worrying that you’ll be fired if you complain. The extortion is inherent in the nature of the theft, unlike shoplifting and most corporate embezzlement. It’s not just the money, it’s long-term abuse and exploitation of people who can’t easily defend themselves.
c) Obviously there is a scale: the Enron embezzlement (which is analogous to your extreme example) is worse than stealing $100 from a single worker. But $50bn in stolen wages is a much graver crime than $50bn in embezzled goods.
I've had this conversation with several employers. They're not paying me for how many hours I was at my desk, they're paying me for my economic output and my impact on the organization.
I get not every single job can have this level of flexibility, but the amount of "theft of time" and "employee shoplifting" that occur throughout America? I would bet my bottom dollar it isn't even close to employers' wage theft.
I new one company that I worked for where many salaried grades actually worked many hours every week over the "expected time"
Citation?
Those few percent off of a paycheck can mean you now cannot pay off your month's credit balance. Next month the debt is larger (due to the outrageous interests), but you still cannot pay it off because your car broke down and you had to fix it to get to work. Next month your mother got sick and you had to help her pay for some medication. Now your debt is growing faster than you can pay it off.
If this equipment is then simply marked as "stolen" to write-off, and this situation is prevalent in tech companies, I could see it being a sizable chunk of the "shoplifting".
P.S. I don't claim literal shoplifting is not happening.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.
TFA: https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...
Total wage violations estimated at $40 billion:
And, if you're going to go with broadly estimated (and somewhat questionable) numbers, then surely you need to consider the ~$50B estimated lost to retail theft each year. Don't just compare $933 million proven lost to wage theft to the over-precise $340,850,358 aggregated from some robbery reports (really, 9 sig figs?) and call it "other theft".
Not to mention that that $933M "recovered" includes many cases of trebled damages...
Wage theft is important. But make an honest case.
But, sure, I do have an issue with those. Just like you don't think every dollar of wage theft is paid as damages, one might also reasonably believe that not every dollar of burglary losses is reported and captured in those aggregate numbers.
On what basis?
What repercussions might the reporter of property theft face? Of wage theft?
Seriously, the loaded/dishonest article and your antagonistic and pseudo-dishonest mode of argument has done more to erode how seriously I will take arguments in this area than to deepen my concern. If this is your objective, keep going down this path.
On the other hand, it's stupid: wage theft is a severe enough concern, deserving of additional advocacy, that it can be done honestly without these kinds of questionable argument tactics.
Nuance is important; people who advocate for one side or the other, honesty be damned, almost never help the situation.
People have off days, get bad sleep, get sad etc. All of this is (must be) factored in already. You don't owe them for being human.
Could you share your numbers on this, please?
The converse is not true. For most stores to have been affected by employee shoplifting only requires a tiny minority of employees - one per store! - to shoplift.
There is also an equilibrium; in the general case employees can't shoplift more than the equivalent security measure to prevent the shoplifting would cost. The equivalent limit to stolen wages is considerably more harrowing: the workers' mental and physical health.
Collectively this means shoplifting can be addressed by fairly typical business measures - additional security, hiring practices, lawsuits against individuals, etc. The infrastructure for all that is already in place, because capital already put it in place to protect itself and because shoplifting is not the norm. But wage theft requires radical or systemic change to ensure employees have the ability to punish all employers, because capital has again put measure in place to protect itself, and wage theft is the norm.
Finally, there is the issue of what you're measuring. Assuming shoplifting and employer theft from low-wage workers occur at the same rate for the same percentage, shoplifting would still dominate because it's much closer to a percentage of total revenue. Obviously total revenue is higher than a fraction of wages!
So how, exactly, is that comparison more meaningful?